IIFT Tradewinds 2018- Rendezvous with Rajeev Singh,COO& Business Head - Karvy Fintech - Global Business Services.

"We also had the privilege of having him as one of the speakers at TradeWinds 2018, we are adding here, some of the key points he made during his speech on the topic "Disruptive Strategies in a data-driven World"

• Over the years, I have had an opportunity to connect, even at foreign locations, with some of the IIFTians. They somehow found ways and means, thanks to technology, to connect with the class. It’s indeed a good feeling to sit where I used to sit amongst you.
• The topic I found was interesting and If I want to sum up everything pertaining to the topic, I would actually relate this to one single term i.e ‘TRANSFORMATION’. I would like to go ahead with this by putting some quotes and data as sometimes we tend to get carried away with the quotes given by others and lose the soul or the essence in actual. 
• Fast forwarding to the automobile industry and look at what exactly happened, which is the self-driven car that has now turned into reality. Whatsapp we can use for so many messages. I am also a big fan of cycles which are now pedaled using the virtue of automation. So what we are looking at is not only automation coming into the picture, but also the journey has brought us closer to the needs that we had identified.
• The transformation that has happened earlier, it was emanating from the fact that as humans, we were trying to pitch ourselves against machines constantly and this is not a new phenomenon. We have been automating work since the wheel was invented. 
• Automation now being a new phenomenon, just by the virtue of subconscious mind you can maneuver the car. Talking about the human and the machines part, we are reading about the subject of what is happening, the fear continues that “Is machine going to overtake Humans”. We are familiar with some Sci-fi Hollywood movies like ‘I-Robot’ where Will Smith is there standing against the army of robots which go against humanity. That being a work of fiction, somebody actually thought of how reality will look like but we need to wear out those options. Various researches, debates, discussions, white papers which are happening globally, needs to be addressed.
• The fallout of this entire drive that we experience is the big question about “are they going to take away our jobs and livelihood itself?”. Because from where we come from the agrarian economy, the manufacturing sector, we have seen that manufacturing has undergone changes and adopted the technology where automatically the bots came over and to make things look fancier and easier.
• Are these trends specific to a particular industry? Are they specific to manufacturing or retail? No, they are there in all the spheres of the activities, almost every industry has seen the penetration of automation
• Talking about what these simple terms of AI, Robotics mean to us, very simply put, in terms of the usage of machine intelligence which is that you have simple terms which emphasize the simplest form and we look at that - Robots, chatbots, etc which has usage dependent on the industry, dependent on the need that has been created and then we look at all those things we convert into automation.
• Are we ready for the transformation that continuously hounds us? I would like to look at another aspect of it. Is there a need for a change across when we look at a human and we are aware of the fact that we experience growth in terms of technology which has happened and continues to happen when we will be giving more charge and control. Is the work that is currently being done like the BPO by giants will be taken away? The answer is Yes.
• There is a huge shift in our approach that needs to be inculcated which will foster the attitude of “Yes I want to change with the changing times!”. Now, what kind of change are we talking about? This reminds me of a famous saying which goes like “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn” that’s a fact that already out there. There are people who left the industry because they have failed to understand the technology. 
• So what are things to ponder on? And for which some of the points I feel are: At the individual level there will be denial, resistance but eventually a commitment will come which will eventually grow at the national economy level. This is due to the fact that it takes a while to reach out to the masses, to be accepted by the people. Secondly, these are the kind of changes which we experience from the respective individual perspective. 
• What we learn from the of examples of various CXO’s perspective is that they took advantage of all the opportunities presented in front of them to by putting in digital operations and not working in silos. 
• I have taken an example of an e-commerce organization from China that we all know of i.e Alibaba by Jack Ma and in this, there are some lessons which I wanted to speak about today. If we look at this from the data perspective, the company is largest in terms of e-commerce market sales of more than $250Bn in the transaction which is equivalent to putting both Amazon and eBay together in terms of data. The lesson that Jack Ma shared with regards to the entire supply chain, the first one, understanding the customer needs, deliver outstanding progress, build logistic partnership is what they are doing, keep the finance close (Budget in check).
• The thing that these people had was they were able to use the technology to slice and dice the data. To sum up, the things we saw the power of technology to reshape the nature of the work. Some are highly optimistic about the economic potential of technology advances whereas others have a fear-factor with respect to the growing technology taking away their livelihood. So to analyze, let’s take a look at the expectations that we have from the technology in terms of economic effects. Expectation one - the wages will increase if the jobs will be hurt but that’s exactly the opposite of what has been found out in the geographies of technological advancements. Last expectation is technological advancement improves productivity but with the data that has come up, we can infer that the productivity growth has shown in the last decade compared to decades before that. One of my advice to young souls would be to read, go through the actual data and make decisions accordingly.
• The new technology will take time to hit the masses that is growing dramatically to that extent. So I believe the things are very good, progressing in a good way. Finally, I believe that the future is bright for the coming generation of students like that of IIFT where you as a future manager can leverage the technology big time.

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